First drive: 2011 Porsche Cayenne

Sumptuous ride spices up the road

By Derek McNaughton, Canwest News Service

Originally published: April 29, 2010

Leipzig, Germany: Even those who don’t pay much attention to the car business will remember the noise that erupted when Porsche announced, roughly a decade ago, it was going to build an SUV.

But the Cayenne, now entering its third generation, has gone on to sell approximately 280,000 units worldwide — more than 5,600 of those finding homes in Canada.

And the departure from building just sports cars was essentially in keeping with the company’s roots, going back to 1900 and the World Exposition in Paris when Dr. Ferdinand Porsche wowed the world with the Lohner-Porsche — a car with electric motors on the wheels. Porsche later took his car with four electric wheel-hub motors — basically the world’s first four-wheel-drive vehicle that, remarkable for its time, also had brakes on each wheel — and combined the battery-powered car with a gasoline engine. So, no, it was not General Motors, Honda or Toyota that invented the hybrid.

Now, Porsche is set to stir the auto world again with the 2011 Cayenne, which adds a hybrid to the company’s production portfolio for the first time. Built at the same factory as the Panamera and Carrera GT in Leipzig, the 2011 Cayenne is not so much an evolution from the previous model as it is a revolution, swirling with good looks from every angle, built to an impeccable fit and finish and resonating with an interior rich enough to leave Architectural Digest readers envious. You couldn’t say that about the old model.

The seats alone are small sculptures, cocooning the driver in a leather lair so comfortable every Cayenne owner will be volunteering to drive anytime anyone needs to go somewhere.

Slightly wider, taller and 48 millimetres longer overall, the new Cayenne might seem like a rolling symbol of contradictions. For instance, even though it’s bigger it looks smaller. It has more features, yet lost some 180 kilograms of weight in the Turbo model. The shark-like snout and rounded fenders in front and back look mean, yet come across as elegant, especially with full LED lighting that’s more understated than on the Audi Q7. Also, the Cayenne boasts as much off-road capability as a Land Rover LR4, yet few Cayennes will ever see much dirt, despite a simplified off-road management system complete with locking differentials in the centre and rear.

For such a large vehicle, the Cayenne is blessed with astonishing speed, especially the 500-horsepower Turbo that with 516 pound-feet of available torque could easily nudge the Alberta border closer to B.C.

In one open stretch of autobahn on a beautiful sunny day, I came just eight kilometres an hour short of the Turbo’s top-rated speed of 278 km/h, yet the SUV felt as though the engine was still gaining on its maximum level of thrust. At that hurricane-like velocity, it would be easy to think the windows would blow out, the paint start to peel and the ride become unnervingly unstable.

After all, I was crossing what amounts to almost one football field every second and displacing about as much air as the space shuttle Atlantis on re-entry. Yet, despite some wind noise around the now door-mounted mirrors, there was stability — comfort, even — and a sense of control that seems hard to rationalize in the Turbo’s 2,170-kg package.

Indeed, the Turbo (with sharp-looking, 19-inch, split five-spoke wheels as standard, 21-inchers as an option) will be the most exciting of the first four Cayenne models to initially arrive in Canada. The $123,900 Turbo will be offered alongside the 400-hp-V8 Cayenne S at $76,000.

In October, the fleet will be joined by the $80,800 S Hybrid, motivated by a supercharged V6. A base V6 model ($58,200) arrives in September and a diesel version with 405 lb-ft of torque could potentially arrive in 2012 as a 2013 model. All Cayennes — except for the base model that uses a six-speed manual — will come with a new eight-speed Tiptronic manumatic.

The S Hybrid, however, will unquestionably be the pride of the fleet, able to achieve impressive fuel economy of 8.2 litres per 100 kilometres in combined city/highway driving, better than many four-cylinder sedans.

An hour’s drive around the city resulted in a 10.9 L/100 km reading, so driving like a reasoned adult should result in the advertised rating. Like the Turbo, acceleration in the Hybrid S is definitely Porsche-like, thanks to the combined efforts of the blown 333-hp V6, aided by 47 hp from the electric motor. The grand sum of 380 hp is just 20 hp shy of the Cayenne S’s V8. Zero to 100 km/h in the hybrid is rated at 6.5 seconds – only 6/10ths slower than the S, The supercharger, too, is positively quiet, yet there’s an appropriate growl to the engine under hard acceleration.

Most interesting, the hybrid can “sail” at highway speed, so when the driver takes his foot off the gas pedal, the gasoline engine shuts down and is detached from the drivetrain to avoid drag forces by the engine. In this mode, the electric motor works as a generator, delivering electric power.

The feature works up to licence-revoking speeds of 156 km/h. Indeed, it’s impressive to see the tach at zero while the hybrid is freewheeling along at more than the legal limit. The second the driver touches the gas pedal, the engine comes back online. The transition between full electric and gasoline electric is as instantaneous as it is unnoticeable — only the most fastidious of drivers will be aware.

Full-power demands are met with right-now enthusiasm. At idle, the engine shuts off completely, as all Cayennes (except the base model) are now equipped with a sensible automatic start/stop function.

But, as impressive as the hybrid technology is, more interesting is the larger picture of how Porsche has put sophisticated engineering and serious performance into an SUV and married it with a sumptuous interior that points to the higher standard of luxury the brand is trying to achieve. An available Burmester sound system, quite possibly the best car-audio system in the universe, is also a signal of that.

The Cayenne may have originally been a questionable proposition, but it now commands such a presence that it would no doubt have made Dr. Porsche very pleased.